Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to computer systems and more particularly to systems and methods for managing Internet content, wherein rules, processes, and the like are handled as business objects (application objects) that have associated services similar to those of content objects and can be individually deployed and implemented.
Related Art
Many companies have a presence on the internet. For instance, a company may have a web site. The web site may be used to provide information about the company, to provide information about the industry or articles relating to the company's business, to enable customers to make inquiries or place orders, and so on.
Often, an enterprise may have many different web sites or internet properties. These internet properties may correspond to divisions of a company, or subsidiary companies and may provide information on the businesses, industries, events, and the like relating to each of the individual companies.
The enterprise typically exercises a certain level of control over the internet properties. For instance, the enterprise may wish for all of its internet properties to have the same look and feel and may therefore wish for the internet properties to share certain content. The enterprise may also wish for the internet properties to be configured in a particular way.
Traditionally, these goals were accomplished by providing complete content repositories or configuration files to the internet properties. In other words, if it was desired for an internet property to use shared content, the enterprise's content repository would be replicated in its entirety at the internet property. If there were changes to the content in the repository, the changes would not be propagated to the internet property until the entire content repository was again copied in its entirety to the internet property.
Similarly, if the enterprise wished to reconfigure one of its Internet properties, it would have to generate new configuration files in their entirety, and then deploy those files to the internet property. The internet property, upon receiving the new files and replacing the old files with them, would have to restart the applications running on the site in order to make the configuration changes effective.
This process of making changes to content or configuration information is inefficient and time consuming. This is particularly true in the case of enterprises that have large numbers of internet properties. Because the entire content repositories or configuration files have to be replaced, and applications potentially restarted, without regard to the magnitude of the actual changes therein, the content and configuration information may not be updated as often as it should (e.g., because the changes are minor, while the updates are costly).